Success Stories
Chevron Creates a Safety-Conscious Culture That Can Scale For Mammoth Gorgon Project
- Client: Chevron Gorgon
- Industry: Energy
- JMJ Service: Delivering Incident and Injury-Free® (IIF®) Results™
"We see this as so fundamental we insist that our contractors partner with us on creating the same culture. We see that IIF safety creates a common bond and language between ourselves as the client and the contractor."
Colin Beckett
General Manager of the Greater Gorgon Area for Chevron
Business Challenges:
Chevron’s Gorgon Project off the northwest coast of Western Australia is projected to cost (AUD) $43 billion. Chevron—the operator of the project, with 50 percent ownership—and its partners, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc., plan to develop the Greater Gorgon gas fields that contain about 40 trillion cubic feet of gas, Australia’s largest-known gas resource.
The Gorgon gas fields are located off Barrow Island, a “Class A” Nature Reserve, making it the most protected type of territory on the continent. Petroleum interests in Barrow Island date back to 1947. A strict environmental management plan, which protects the island’s unique species, has enabled petroleum activities to successfully coexist with the island’s Class A status for more than 40 years.
The scope of the project includes a gas processing facility on Barrow Island consisting of three, 5-million ton per annum liquefied natural gas (LNG) trains and a domestic gas plant. At its peak, the Gorgon project will undoubtedly be Chevron’s largest project in the world. Today, approximately 2,000 people comprise the project’s core team, distributed globally from Perth, Australia to Barrow Island to Singapore, Jakarta and the U.K.
Throughout the lengthy multiyear “checklist process” used by the owners to evaluate progress, the Gorgon project’s Incident and Injury-Free safety program has been a consistent touchstone for the project team.
Client Goals:
- Build a strong culture of care and concern in the Gorgon core project team to ensure that they can effectively transfer those values into the larger project as it scales.
- Create an Incident and Injury-Free workplace.
How JMJ Helped:
JMJ’s Incident and Injury-Free offering has helped the Chevron Gorgon project team create a strong safety culture. Since engaging with the project five years ago, JMJ has worked with Chevron to develop its safety focus so that, when the Gorgon project starts to scale, it will be more easily cascaded to everyone on the team, including contractors and sub-contractors.
According to Colin Beckett, General Manager of the Greater Gorgon Area for Chevron, "IIF safety is part of our Operational Excellence (OE) management system. It provides the culture to support our processes—they are glued together and neither can stand alone. You need both great systems and procedures, as well as strong culture to support their use and value."
Paul Levendoski, Chevron Gorgon Downstream Manager, Perth, stated, "With JMJ we developed a much stronger commitment to safety among individuals and teams. People share a common mindset that is intolerant of any accident or incident and have a powerful belief that all incidents are preventable. This culture helps us to use our OE safety systems more successfully.
JMJ’s work with the Gorgon project team has included an emphasis on health and well-being, both in the workplace and away from the office. Many people on the project team speak about how their relationship to safety has changed, at work and at home, and how they have embraced safety-consciousness as a value.
“That we have been able to assist the Gorgon Project team to create an IIF culture at this early phase of the Gorgon project’s life bodes well for those who will follow the design team, building and operating the Gorgon gas fields and trains,” emphasized JMJ consultant Miles Protter of Perth. “It is far easier and more efficient to set a culture at project start than to come in after a culture has been established that turns out not to perform according to plan.”
Results:
The IIF program has been instrumental as a constant in the midst of the lengthy start-up phase of the Gorgon project. JMJ helped the Gorgon core project team embrace safety as a value, establishing a strong safety culture that is scalable as the project grows in size and complexity.
“The IIF program provides a series of simple concepts that people take into their lives, rather than just a safety program to be applied at work,” Colin Becket said. “I like the JMJ process. IIF safety on Gorgon has been taken up extremely well and blends well with the Australian culture.”
“I saw IIF safety as a natural expansion of my safety skills,” Paul Levendoski stated. “Personally, my relationship to safety has changed. It was much more mechanical and process-driven in the past, which worked fine for the environment I was in. But the powerful insights I’ve had into relationships forming the foundation of accomplishments, the power of unlocking employees’ voluntary contribution, and the understanding of collateral issues when an injury does occur, help me relate to safety in a much more holistic way now.”